A look at Clint Didier

Jim Brunner from The Seattle Times has a nice piece about GOP Senate candidate Clint Didier in Thursday’s paper.

Didier is against most government spending, but Brunner points out that the Eastern Washington farmer benefits nicely from federal largesse.

Didier’s way of life wouldn’t be possible without the federal government’s creation of the Columbia Basin Project, the Depression-era irrigation system authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Irrigation canals fed by Grand Coulee Dam weave through Didier’s farm tracts, allowing him to grow green rows of alfalfa in an area that would otherwise be ruled by sagebrush, cheatgrass and rattlesnakes.

He acknowledges the federal government’s role, to a point. But he argues that since Columbia Basin farmers are assessed annual per-acre payments for the dam, they are actually subsidizing the cheap electricity the system sends to Western Washington.

Studies have shown the opposite is true. The irrigation network that benefits farmers like Didier has been mostly paid for by federal taxpayers and electricity ratepayers elsewhere. A 1995 paper co-authored by economists at Washington State University estimated that farmers were paying only 1.5 percent of the irrigation system’s cost.